Eighty-Five from the Archive: John O’Hara

This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

In a Times review published seven years ago, Charles McGrath said of John O’Hara that, “He created what later came to be called ‘the New Yorker story’—one that turns on a tiny alteration in tone or mood—and he paved the way for Salinger, Cheever, Updike and even Carver.” O’Hara, who authored sixteen novels and fourteen short-story collections, contributed nearly two hundred and thirty short stories, including the “Pal Joey” sketches, to The New Yorker, from 1928 to 1967. The man who Edmund Wilson once referred to as the “master of the short-story sketch” even set some of his stories in a fictional version of his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up the eldest of eight children in a wealthy family. When his father died, in 1925, the family was left virtually penniless, and O’Hara had to give up his dream of attending Yale, a decision that would haunt him later in life. After various odd jobs, he landed in New York writing for The Herald Tribune, and, shortly thereafter, he began contributing short stories to The New Yorker.

O’Hara’s upbringing had left him keenly aware of the effects of class and social status and both were recurring themes in his work. As Lionel Trilling once wrote,

[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received.

Of course, O’Hara’s years at the magazine were also fraught with numerous petty arguments and various conflicts with colleagues. He ended friendships with the writers Brendan Gill and Wolcott Gibbs over perceived slights, and he often complained that he was underpaid. In 2003, Charles McGrath commented on O’Hara’s troublesome behavior:

At The New Yorker in the mid-1970’s, it was still possible to hear editors debating which of the magazine’s illustrious contributors had been the bigger jerk and the more impossible to deal with—James Thurber or John O’Hara. Thurber usually won—no small feat considering that O’Hara (when he was sober) was famously boorish, vain, petty, snobbish, quarrelsome and just plain hard to take. When he was drunk (which was often) he was apt to punch you out just for looking at him the wrong way—even if you were a woman or, as on one memorable occasion at “21,” a midget.

O’Hara may have been difficult to deal with, but his stories—with their ability to capture so expertly the social foibles of a unique period in time—still resonate. In a foreword to his novella collection “Sermons and Soda-Water,” O’Hara offered insight into his fiction:

I want to get it all down on paper while I can… The Twenties, the Thirties, and the Forties are already history, but I cannot be content to leave their story in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and to do it with complete honesty and variety.

Today we highlight “Graven Image,” which ran in the issue of March 13, 1943. (E. L. Doctorow chose the story to read on the Fiction Podcast in 2008.) The story is set during a period when membership in various exclusive social or collegial clubs could determine one’s path in life. Charles Browning is a member of one such exclusive club, and he has asked for a lunch meeting with an old friend, known simply by his title, the Under Secretary, in pursuit of a political job. In this excerpt, the tension between insider and outsider is made crystalline:

“You were asking me if it isn’t water under the bridge. Why should it be?” “The obvious reason,” said Browning. “My country, ‘tis of thee’?” “Exactly. Isn’t that enough?” “It isn’t for your Raquet Club pal over there.” “You keep track of things like that?” “Certainly,” said the Under Secretary. “I know every goddam club in this country, beginning back about twenty-three years ago. I had ample time to study them all then, you recall, objectively, from the outside. By the way, I notice you wear a wristwatch. What happens to the little animal?” Browning put his hand in his pocket and brought out a small bunch of keys. He held the chain so that the Under Secretary could see, suspended from it, a small golden pig. “I still carry it,” he said… “Listen, Joe, are we talking like grown men? Are you sore at the Pork? Do you think you’d have enjoyed being a member of it? If being sore at it was even partly responsible for getting you where you are, then I think you ought to be a little grateful to it. You’d show the bastards…” … The Under Secretary smiled. “There’s no getting away from it, you guys have got something. O.K., what are you interested in? Of course, I make no promises, and I don’t even know if what you’re interested in is something I can help you with.”… Browning went on to tell the Under Secretary about the job he wanted. He told him why he thought he was qualified for it, and the Under Secretary nodded… He told Browning that he thought there might be some little problem with a certain character but that that character could be handled, because the real say-so, the green light, was controlled by a man who was a friend of the Under Secretary’s, and the Under Secretary could almost say at this moment that the matter could be arranged. At this, Browning grinned, “By God, Joe, we’ve got to have a drink on this. This is the best news since—” He summoned the waiter. The Under Secretary yielded and ordered a cordial. Browning ordered a Scotch. The drinks were brought… Browning looked at the drink in his hand. “You know, I was a little afraid. That other stuff, the club stuff.” “Yes,” said the Under Secretary. “I don’t know why fellows like you—you never would have made it in a thousand years, but”—then, without looking up, he knew everything had collapsed—“but I’ve said exactly the wrong thing, haven’t I?” “That’s right, Browning,” said the Under Secretary. “You’ve said exactly the wrong thing. I’ve got to be going.” He stood up and turned and went out, all dignity.